Herbert Hoover was worth $4 million in 1914 as a mining engineer and mine owner. This was before World War I, when the dollar bought 25 times more than it does today. He was good at what he did in the private sector. He gained national fame as a World War I relief administrator: Belgian […]

This is ad copy from the publisher: Hot off the press: Christian Economics in One Lesson, by Dr. Gary North. Powder Springs, GA: American Vision Press, 2016. Hardback with dust jacket. 241pp. $25.00. On Sale: $20.00. Christian Economics in One Lesson is a biblical reworking of Henry Hazlitt’s classic introduction to economic thought, Economics in […]

“The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn’t a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. […]

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has written an article on a United Nations report on debt and default. He is a Keynesian. He worries about deflation. Deflation is the ultimate negative sanction in his view. Like all Keynesians, he does not understand the healing effects of deflation. But I read him because he provides data on the fragility […]

By John Mauldin Yes, the system is rigged, just not in the way that 99% of the people think it is and not by those they think are doing the rigging. Greed is not the reason for the rigging, nor are any of the other usual “follow the money” reasons. We cannot make a convenient […]

John Maynard Keynes was a crackpot. So are his followers. All of them. I can hear the shocked response. “But, Dr. North, you’re not supposed to say such things. It’s not polite. It shows a lack of etiquette. People who say such things are themselves dismissed as crackpots.” To which I respond: “Dismissed by whom?” […]

My generation says: “Each of us can remember where he was when he heard about Kennedy’s assassination. I can remember where I was when I heard about Nixon’s killing of the phony gold standard that John Maynard Keynes and the Soviet spy Harry Dexter White designed in 1944. It was a Sunday afternoon: August 15, […]

John Maynard Keynes is most famous for two statements. This first appeared in the final paragraph of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled […]

The Big White Elephant is on life support but not for much longer. Airbus Industries, its parent EADS and the governments who continue to subsidize its production can no longer justify its continuity at the expense of the European tax payer. A rapidly shrinking customer base and less than a hand full of customers who […]

I begin with what I regard as the fundamental fact of modern economic life: the present value of the unfunded liabilities of the United States government. The economist who has been most vocal about this is Prof. Lawrence Kotlikoff of Boston University. He releases an estimate every year. His estimate is this: somewhere in the […]